Monday, February 25, 2013

Nursing Some Trouble

Now, of course, I don't know exactly what happened here. The nurses may have been busy on some huge emergency and simply failed to communicate that well. The baby's arrival may indeed have been entirely (and reasonably) unexpected. Heck, for all we know, the mother lied to the nursing staff about her symptoms.

On the other hand, maybe the nurses were goofing off, or negligent, or improperly trained. These are precisely the issues that the hospital will be investigating, and I expect that the result will be published in due course.

Witnesses should be spoken to, records should be kept, and to the extent that a person or a system if to blame, action should be taken to remedy it. That's how the matter should be dealt with.

I have no idea how the tweet was brought to the journalist's attention, but either way it's something that bears reporting. I don't agree with stories about the personal lives of politician's family ("MP's Son Failing Year 10", for example) but this is a family member putting out a pretty derogatory opinion. And he's doing it in a very public forum - it's hardly a carelessly whispered word at a bar somewhere.

It's especially important in that it reflects the kind of attitude that many people believe (rightly or wrongly) that many Liberal members hold. That's particularly interesting when, as occurred above, the member in question refused to criticise her husband (although, in fairness, we don't know for sure why she didn't return the calls).

True it is that Roza Sage is not the relevant local member (map of her electorate is available here), is not the health minister, and as far as I know had absolutely nothing to do with the events at the hospital. She had the opportunity to say "My husbands an idiot, even I barely listen to him, and he doesn't speak for me" but she didn't take it. On one level, her failure to speak out and disavow the comments is more revealing that the fact her husband made them.

Having said all that, this isn't something that anyone is going to remember too well, I don't think. Politicians (and, for that matter, celebrities generally) have been getting into trouble for what they have been saying on twitter for almost as long as we have had twitter accounts. As you can see, there has hardly been an upswing in interest in Mr Sage's account.

What will be revealing will be if we start seeing more of this kind of story, especially in the lead-up to this year's federal election.

In fairness to him, here is Mr Sage's response to the article, directed at the journo who wrote it, Barclay Crawford: